A Journey into Steinbeck's California Read online

  Dorothy’s Kitchen.

  At one time, palms grew along Central Avenue, sure signs of wealth and status in early Northern California. Near the corner of Salinas Street and Central Avenue, Dessie Hamilton, Steinbeck’s beloved aunt, had a “nice little house” that the Trasks purchase in East of Eden. Dessie functions as a kind of feminine center in the book, her enclave of women in sharp contrast to manipulative Kate’s brothel.

  [Dessie’s] shop was a unique institution in Salinas. It was a woman’s world. Here all the rules, and the fears that created the iron rules, went down. The door was closed to men. It was a sanctuary where women could be themselves—smelly, wanton, mystic, conceited, truthful, and interested…. At Dessie’s they were women who went to the toilet and overate and scratched and farted. And from this freedom came laughter, roars of laughter.

  It is wise to keep this passage in mind when reading Steinbeck’s books—he came from a family of women, his literary agents were women, and many of his friends were women. Although his fictional women may be “warped” into stereotypical roles, their status says more about social mores than about authorial inclination.

  The Graves house, 147 Central Avenue, where scenes from East of Eden were filmed.

  The house next door to the Steinbecks’, at 134 Central Avenue, is the oldest on the street, dating to 1890. In 1918, a year before Steinbeck left for college, the Griffin family rented the home; Mr. Griffin is mentioned in East of Eden as the saloon owner who “didn’t like anything about liquor” and “on a Saturday night he might refuse to serve twenty men he thought had had enough.”

  One of Steinbeck’s closest childhood friends, Glenn Graves, lived in the house at 147 Central Avenue. In a 1969 interview, Glenn remembered that John “was a very good listener, especially to old timers who had stories to tell…. He would visit the Williams sisters quite often.” Those two unmarried sisters, eccentric and rich, characters in East of Eden and possibly “Johnny Bear,” knew all the history of Salinas, as did Glenn’s mother. “She could tell stories,” Glenn recalled. “Anyone had a story to tell, he was ready to listen. A lot of them came out in later books, and people didn’t like it around here.” The interior of the Graves’s house was used during shooting of the 1955 film East of Eden, and Glenn was a local technical advisor.

  Another friend, Max Wagner, often stayed with his grandparents at 153 Central Avenue. The Wagner family had lived in Mexico, and Steinbeck may have first learned to appreciate Mexican culture at their home. He apparently found Mrs. Wagner a kindred spirit: she had been a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor during the Mexican Revolution, and he would sometimes read her his stories. Max’s uncle owned a ranch north of Salinas off San Juan Grade Road, where Max lived from 1912 to 1914. John frequently rode his pony out there and later used this ranch, in part, as the setting for stories about Jody, a boy probably modeled on himself and Max. Max later worked in Hollywood, and in 1939 he introduced John to the woman who would become his second wife, Gwyn Conger. Steinbeck cowrote A Medal for Benny with Max’s older brother, Jack.

  Monterey County Courthouse

  The present Monterey County Courthouse, at 240 Church Street, was built around an older structure where Steinbeck’s father worked as treasurer of Monterey County. The courtyard is a serene place to sit.

  Today’s imposing courthouse is on the National Register of Historic Places. The proposal for historic status describes it as “a perfect example, inside and out, of the Works Projects Administration Moderne style of the 1930s and also an excellent example of a concrete building whose surface is articulated by the pattern of form boards.”

  Artist Jo Mora’s work is seen on the courthouse exterior. Born in Uruguay in 1876 to a Spanish father, also a sculptor, and a French mother, Mora traveled throughout the southwestern United States early in the twentieth century, living for a time with Hopi Indians. The painter Frederick Remington encouraged Mora’s work in clay models of cowboys, Indians, and animals. From 1920 on, Mora lived in Carmel; he designed the sarcophagus of Father Junipero Serra at the Carmel Mission—”the supreme professional effort of my life,” he wrote—and a wooden sculpture of Serra in the Carmel woods.

  Mora’s work for the courthouse is a fitting counterpart to Steinbeck’s, an artistic rendering of Monterey County’s diverse history. His sixty-one concrete heads represent dramatis personae of the county’s history. Doors on the building’s west section depict a rich historical pageant: Native Americans; the coming of the Spanish represented by Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo’s and Sebastian Vizcaíno’s ships, by Gaspar de Portolá on his horse, and by soldiers; the Mission period, with a Franciscan friar surrounded by neophyte reapers of grain and the missions of San Carlos and San Antonio; and the American period, with a trapper on horseback, a wagon train, a bather, an angler, a hunter, a football player, and a golfer.

  The Monterey County Courthouse, 240 Church Street.

  At the corner of Central and Capitol, at 120 Capitol Street, is the Roosevelt School, the site of the former West End School, where Olive Steinbeck went to high school and John attended classes in grades three through eight. “Salinas had two grammar schools,” Steinbeck writes in East of Eden, “big yellow structures with tall windows, and the windows were baleful and the doors did not smile…. The West End, a huge building of two stories, fronted with gnarled poplars, divided the play yards called girlside and boyside.” Young Steinbeck, usually edging in on trouble, bringing home mediocre grades, was a solidly boyside sort. The building was torn down in 1925, but the poplars remain, as does a World War I memorial, with Martin Hopps’s name at the top—the first of the town’s servicemen to be killed. The Hopps’s house once stood precisely where the memorial now stands. Steinbeck memorializes him in East of Eden:

  Martin Hopps lived around the corner from us. He was wide, short, red-haired. His mouth was wide, and he had red eyes. He was almost the shyest boy in Salinas. To say good morning to him was to make him itch with self-consciousness. He belonged to Troop C because the armory had a basketball court.

  If the Germans had known Olive and had been sensible they would have gone out of their way not to anger her. But they didn’t know or they were stupid. When they killed Martin Hopps they lost the war because that made my mother mad and she took out after them. She had liked Martin Hopps. He had never hurt anyone. When they killed him Olive declared war on the German empire.

  … She found her weapon in Liberty bonds …. [and] began to sell bonds by the bale. She brought ferocity to her work. I think she made people afraid not to buy them.

  Olive rides in an army airplane, 1918.

  Martin Hopps’s name is the first on this World War I memorial.

  The Nesbitt house, 66 Capitol Avenue.

  For her patriotism, Olive Steinbeck earned a terrifying (to her) ride in an army airplane to Spreckels, a true and hilarious story that found its way into East of Eden. At 66 Capitol Avenue is the Nesbitt house, built in 1881 (ignore the sign on the house next door). Salinas Town Marshall William Nesbitt, sheriff during Steinbeck’s childhood and youth, lived here from 1902 to 1923. In East of Eden, Sheriff Quinn is modeled on Nesbitt, as Steinbeck notes in Journal of a Novel (1969), his East of Eden notebook: “When we first see Nesbitt (Sheriff Quinn) he will be Chief Deputy … I remember him well. He lived just around the corner from us.” And in the novel he writes, “He was an institution, as much a part of the Salinas Valley as its mountains.”

  What Hometown Monument to Steinbeck?

  In 1987, the retired managing editor of the local paper summarized Steinbeck’s reputation in Salinas: Old-timers “hate him,” he said. In book after book, it seemed, Steinbeck exposed denizens’ weaknesses, unlocked their secrets, and seemingly ridiculed the good and the proper—and to make matters worse, sided not with growers but with workers.

  But, a couple of decades after public burnings of The Grapes of Wrath in Salinas, the town began to reconsider Steinbeck’s stature, ready to bestow some local honor. On
e of the first proposals was a 1957 suggestion for a John Steinbeck High School. The author declined that honor, writing that the town might “name a bowling alley after me or a dog track—but a school! The results might be disastrous not only to me but to the future generations of young people of the city of Salinas.” He added, “Consider, if you will, the disastrous result if some innocent and talented student should look into my own scholastic record, seeking perhaps for inspiration. Why his whole ambition might crash in flames.” The John Steinbeck High School did not materialize.

  In 1959 a proposal was sent to the author for a John Steinbeck “browsing room” in the soon-to-be-constructed Salinas Library. He replied, “Your charming suggestion … is very pleasing to me, if my name would not drive people out. I must say that in the old library where Mrs. (Carry) Striening, for so many years presided over the stacks, I’ve browsed the product practically to the roots.” The room became a reality.

  Salinas honored Steinbeck again with a special Rodeo edition of the paper in July 1963—this time not bothering to ask permission. Recovering from an eye operation, the author responded with wry appreciation:

  No town celebrates a writer before he’s dead. It just isn’t done. And if it’s true that Salinas has done this—then Salinas has broken the rules again. It’s hard to believe that you have done this and I must admit it makes me feel a little dead. I’m not yet permitted to read, so I don’t know what you said, but you sure said it big!…

  Now that was a pleasant thing for you all to do,… this Salinas edition… makes me feel very good and warm.

  For many Salinas residents, a browsing room and a newspaper edition were simply not enough. For others, his legacy still rankled. “Council Cool to Idea of Creating ‘Steinbeck Square’” noted the local paper on April 2, 1963. Monterey County citizens rejected the notion of renaming the Salinas/Monterey highway the Steinbeck Highway. A proposal to make the Steinbeck home a state monument fizzled in 1967.

  After Steinbeck’s death in 1968, consideration was given to renaming Central Avenue or Main Street as Steinbeck Calle, naming the library or the municipal auditorium after Steinbeck, or revisiting the idea of a John Steinbeck High School. Other proposals were a subdivision of low-income houses, a mountain peak, and Central Park, where Steinbeck played as a boy (an honor favored by his widow, Elaine, and his sister Esther).

  With many in the community still protesting, renaming the library prevailed, by a four-to-one vote of the library board. “I voted against it,” Reverend Jo Wright of the Alisal Assembly of God told local papers. “In examining this gentleman’s life and the type of life he lived, it’s not a very exemplary one for young people coming into a library. He roamed quite a bit.” San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was amused. “Latest from Lettuceland, “ he wrote: “In Salinas even Shakespeare would have trouble getting a unanimous vote.”

  The John Steinbeck Library, 350 Lincoln Avenue.

  If a stray dog wanders by, imagine seeing Bob Ford, Salinas’s dogcatcher for a time, who would dress in full cowboy duds and rope stray mutts. He is “Long Bob on his white horse carrying the flag” in the July 4th parade in Cannery Row—as he carried the flag in every Salinas horse parade—and Tall Bob Smoke in Tortilla Flat.

  The Steinbeck family doctor, Dr. Murphy, lived at 402 Cayuga Street, a house owned by the Murphy family from 1901 to 1950. Dr. Murphy saved Steinbeck’s life when he had pneumonia in 1917 by performing surgery in the family home. Murphy’s grandsons, Dennis and Michael Murphy, may well have been Steinbeck’s models for the two boys in East of Eden, tormented Cal and Aron. (The Murphy family also owned Esalen, hot springs valued once by Native Americans and now a high-end retreat near Big Sur.) Steinbeck wrote several letters to Dennis Murphy and to Dr. Murphy when Dennis decided to become an author. “Your only weapon is your work,” he wrote Dennis.

  On the same block, at 418 Cayuga Street, once stood St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Rectory, where Aron Trask in East of Eden goes to study after school with quiet Mr. Rolf, “unmarried and simple in his tastes.” The Steinbeck family attended St. Paul’s when it was on 80 West Alisal Street. As an altar boy, Steinbeck once “set the cross in its socket at the end of processional and forgot to throw the brass latch that held it in. At the reading of the second lesson I saw with horror the heavy brass cross sway and crash on that holy hairless head. The bishop went down like a pole-axed cow.” He tells this vivid memory in The Winter of Our Discontent.

  John Steinbeck Library

  The John Steinbeck Library at 350 Lincoln Avenue housed the city’s Steinbeck archives until 1998. In 2004 and 2005 the library made the national news when it and two other Salinas libraries were threatened with closure because of insufficient funding. Had that happened, Salinas would have been the country’s largest city without a public library. The American Library Association sent a delegation to Salinas in February 2005. An April 2005 read-in, drawing authors and citizens, was covered nationally. A private fundraising drive helped keep the library open, and a 2005 funding initiative passed. Its plight highlighted the importance of libraries to small towns.

  National Steinbeck Center, 1 Main Street.

  When John Steinbeck walked to “Baby School,” today Clay Street Park, he picked up his friend Herb Hinrichs, who lived in the sixgable house at 338 Church Street, across the street from what is now the John Steinbeck Library. Hinrichs insisted that he was the model for Andy in Cannery Row, the boy who mocked the old Chinese man.

  The National Steinbeck Center

  Open since 1998, the National Steinbeck Center, at 1 Main Street, is a monument to the writer, the area’s agricultural history, and the region’s artistic heritage. The building houses the city’s Steinbeck archives as well as what may be the world’s only museum dedicated to scenes from a writer’s work and artifacts from his life. Re-created are the Red Pony’s stall, George and Lennie’s bunkhouse (with a mouse in Lennie’s coat pocket), and Mrs. Malloy’s boiler home on Cannery Row. Also here are film posters; an audio presentation of Steinbeck reading, “I Am a Revolutionary”; dust bowl diaries; a page from The Pearl manuscript; and the crown jewel, Rocinante, the truck that Steinbeck drove around America with his dog, Charley. The forest green GMC pickup has a specially designed interior built to Steinbeck’s plan. Curtains made by third wife Elaine Steinbeck still hang on the windows. Motor silent, back door open, parked at the top of Salinas’s Main Street, the truck signifies much that Steinbeck represents: his restlessness, his many road narratives, his abiding love for America and for Americans’ quest for dream landscapes.

  Chinatown flooded. “And do you remember how an easterly breeze brought odors in from Chinatown, roasting pork and punk and black tobacco and yen shi? And do you remember the deep blatting stroke of the great gong in the Joss House, and how its tone hung in the air so long?”

  The Travels with Charley trip, a broad sweep from New York to California and back, suggests the pattern of his life and his work: He gave insistent voice to the American myth of what he called “westering,” the hope of renewal; and he articulated with empathy and intense detail the retreat from dreams and aspirations, the failure of the arc westward, the shattered dreams of so many California patriarchs and farmers. “Eastering” became a retreat from the grand vision of the open road.

  The National Steinbeck Center opened a new wing in 2003, with exhibits focusing on the history of agriculture in the valley. It highlights the sugar beet empire, migrant workers in the valley, and the lettuce industry.

  Behind the Steinbeck Center, Market Street was once Castroville Street, the road to Castroville. In East of Eden, the unpaved road is “deep in sticky mud, and Chinatown was so flooded that its inhabitants had laid planks across the narrow street that separated their hutches. The clouds against the evening sky were the gray of rats, and the air was not damp but dank.” Across Market Street, the railroad depot stands at 11 Station Place. North of this station was the Sperry Flour Mill that Mr. Steinbeck managed from 1900 to 1911.<
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  Monterey County Bank, 201 Main Street. Frequented by Kate in East of Eden.

  Main Street—Kate’s Walk

  Main Street retains much of its nineteenth-century flavor. This is the street that sinister brothel madam Kate walks in East of Eden, making weekly bank deposits. The steamy red-light district was near Salinas’s Chinatown, a few blocks east, where the Long Green, the Elite, and the Arno were located. At the corner of Sausal and California streets was the Palace, Jenny’s place in East of Eden. (Jenny’s real name was Mary Jane Reynolds; she died in 1922 and is buried in the Garden of Memories Cemetery.)

  Kate “always went to the same places—first to the Monterey County Bank where she was admitted behind the shining bars that defended the safe-deposit vault.” Kate’s bank was at 201 Main Street, built in 1907 by architect William Weeks. Kate crossed the street and ”stepped into Porter and Irvine’s” old department store at 210-14 Main Street “and looked at dresses.” At 3:30 she climbed the stairs to the offices over the Farmers’ Mercantile, at 247 Main Street, and went to the doctor’s office, and then stopped at Bell’s Candy, at 242 Main Street, “and bought a two-pound box of mixed chocolates. She never varied her route.” Because the real owner of Bell’s Candy hated houses of ill repute, Steinbeck, turning the screw ever so slightly, had the fictional madam enter the store.